Cannes 2026: 8 Highly Anticipated Movies That Made the Line-up (And 2 Surprises)

After the lockdown sensation of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and the dazzling auteur arrival of I Saw The TV Glow, it would be a gross understatement to say that the buzz around Jane Schoenburn’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is palpable. The wonderfully talented filmmaker’s latest stars Hannah Einbinder, Eva Victor and Gillian Anderson in a movie about a horror director’s attempts to recast a franchise’s final girl. 

The early word is that Camp Miasma (which has been selected to open the Un Certain Regard sidebar) will be a surrealist mashup of slasher movie tropes. If the director’s work so far has taught us anything, it's that there’s a good chance of this not looking like anything we’ve seen before — here’s hoping. 

After winning the Best Foreign language Oscar in 2022 for Drive My Car, a gentle epic of a movie that wasn’t even the best thing the director released that year (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy hive rise!), and popping up out of nowhere that year in Venice with the more contained wonders of his eco-mystery-thriller Evil Does Not Exist, fans of Ryusuke Hamaguchi have been waiting patiently for his next big swing.

Going purely on vibes, All of a Sudden — which will see him return to the Croisette in competition with his first French-language project, and in which Virginie Eviro stars as a care home worker who befriends a terminally ill patient — sounds like just the ticket. Of course, it’s always challenging when an auteur famous for their dialogue decides to work outside their native tongue — but the Japanese filmmaker has more than earned the benefit of the doubt.

The biggest suprise and most welcome addition to the selection so far (at least for me) is Na Hong-jin's Hope, the South Korean director's first film since The Waiting, which was released all the way back in 2016. That horror movie landed outside the Cannes competition, but his latest (which features Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander amongst a cast of Korean stars) has been selected to compete for the main prize. It's a trajectory that never fails to get me excited, especially when it comes to genre filmmakers.

From what I can gather, Hope is being billed as a sci-fi mystery set near the Demilitarised Zone between North and South Korea.

From My Summer of Love to Ida to Cold War, the Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski has yet to miss — the kind of filmmaker who has enjoyed substantial awards recognition (he won an Oscar for Ida and earned a surprise nomination for Best Director for Cold War) and box office success without ever seeming in too much of a hurry to get his next project off the ground.

When his latest, titled Fatherland and starring the woman of the moment, Sandra Hüller, as the wife of Thomas Mann, takes its bow in Cannes this May, it will be eight whole years since a Pawlikowski film last premiered. Whether or not that absence has made anyone’s heart grow fonder (it has), I fully expect it to be among the early frontrunners for the Palme d'Or.

The second big surprise in this morning's press conference was Ira Sach's The Man I Love. Since breaking out with Keep the Lights On in 2012, Sachs has proven himself to be both one of the most consistently heart-wrenching filmmakers of his generation (think Little Men, Love is Strange) but also one of the great chroniclers of queer stories (Peter Hujar's Day, Passages) of his era, too.

I think it's safe to expect The Man I Love — a musical film set during the AIDS epidemic, starring Rami Malek and Ebon Moss-Bachrach — to deliver on both counts.

Having stayed loyal to Cannes for much of his career (he even served as Jury President in 2017), Pedro Almodóvar decided to up ship and go to Venice with his most recent film — the Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton-starring The Room Next Door. He also ended up going home from that festival with his first-ever major prize.

The director will follow that achievement with a return to both Spanish-language filmmaking and Cannes, his favourite festival stomping ground, with Bitter Christmas, another (presumably) colourful, sexy and darkly comic melodrama — this one about an advertising director dealing with the loss of her mother during the festive season.

I’ve written so much hype about Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord in the last few months that it almost feels like I’ve already seen it. The not-so-prolific director’s sixth feature stars Oscar-nominees Renate Reinsve and Sebastian Stan in a story about a family who move from Romania to a small Norwegian village, where awkward culture clashes and deeply-ingrained prejudices presumably arise.

With his previous film, R.M.N., Mungiu managed to make a fascinating and worrying statement about the state of the European project, and Fjord looks like a continuation of those ideas and themes. At least one Cannes film has ended up in the Oscar conversation in each of the last few years. At the time of writing, this one looks to have the best shot. 

Speaking of not very prolific directors, Nicolas Winding Refn began his career as an energetic provocateur, cranking out a film every other year between 1996’s Pusher and The Neon Demon in 2016. Since then, he’s stuck to television (with Too Old to Die Young and Copenhagen Cowboy), but the 2026 Cannes Film Festival has now been confirmed as the place where he will make his long-awaited big-screen return.

The film is titled Her Private Hell, and it features the impossibly attractive central trio of Diego Calva, Charles Melton and Sophie Thatcher. At this point, nothing else has been revealed, which makes it all the more tantalising.

Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless was one of the genuine sensations of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, but war, censorship, and an apparently near-fatal brush with Covid have meant that we’ve had to wait patiently to see what the daring Russian filmmaker would do next.

Now, that wait is finally over, as Minotaur — which will apparently focus on a high-powered executive whose world starts to crumble around him — has been confirmed for this year's Cannes competition. If you liked Loveless and his remarkable 2014 breakout film Leviathan, make sure to add this one to your list. It will surely be a contender.

Asghar Farhadi, a director responsible for two Iranian Best Foreign Language wins at the Oscars (for A Separation and The Salesman), has spent the last few years embroiled in a plagiarism lawsuit surrounding his 2021 film A Hero —a story that was serious enough to inspire a long read investigative article in the New Yorker.

With a deadly war currently raging in his native country, however, the selection committee have wisely chosen to welcome him back to the Croisette with his latest film, Parallel Tales — though we imagine the cast of French cinema royalty probably helped. Catherine Deneuve, Isabel Huppert, Virginie Efira and Vincent Cassel share top billing in a movie apparently set around the terrorist attack at the Bataclan in 2015.